Ride or walk?
The answer is often assumed if the question is even asked. Riding is presumed for a striking number of American golf courses. Nonetheless those rebels that do preference the walk appreciate this practice beyond wanting a little exercise. But the question of why remains.
Walk or ride, you’re playing the same game, inhabiting the same space, seeing the same things. Is there something to the manner in which you traverse some six-thousand yards that makes a meaningful difference to your experience of a round of golf? And if so, then perhaps this is an indication that this phenomenon goes beyond the confines of the course to life as a whole.
I think there’s an intuition here about walking. It’s the job of the philosopher or thinker to explore and expound upon such intuitions. With this in mind, I’m interested in what others have said about walking.
For starters, let’s look at Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” (1862). Of its handful of different threads, the essay has an overarching concern for the human person in relation to nature and in relation to the whole of society. It comments on civilization, the beauties of the natural world, education and knowledge, history, and addresses a certain lethargy and dullness Thoreau sees in the lives of his contemporaries. In this, the dull is the tame. Thoreau wants the wild of the wood, not the cultivation of the city.
In this post I’m trying to see if his thoughts on walking—which are always about more than walking—provide any insight into the game of golf and its play.
Knights of Sauntering
Thoreau celebrates the “art of Walking,” an art he finds so few practitioners of since so few have a “genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING.” Thoreau fancies himself a knight of a “new, or rather an old, order,” that of “Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class.” He laments the craftsmen and shopkeepers sitting on their rumps all day. Whereas for himself:
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and field, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
Further, it’s not about “taking exercise . . . it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.” I’ve made a similar point previously regarding the game of golf. Its uselessness is something that recommends its worth: it isn’t used for some further end. It itself is the goal. Exercise and camaraderie and a respite from the demands of life, all this is part of it, but these are not some other, further goals for which we need undertake a round of golf.
Thoreau stands—haughtily?—unimpressed by the society he inhabits. It’s the wild and unruly not the cultivated and crafted he’s after. So much of his walking-sensibility is steeped in the experience of distancing oneself from society, which according to Thoreau dulls the sensibilities and renders one devoid of life. As he laments: “How little appreciation of the beauty of the land-scape there is among us!”
Thoreau’s ideal is the wild: “Life consists in wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued by man, its presence refreshes him.” Further, he claims “it is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.” His “hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.” And it is walking that brings Thoreau to this place.
But, Thoreau says, “I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only.” But in crossing the border, “the walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land.”
The walker is also freer. She just saunters past the “Cart Path Only” sign, going wherever she pleases.
Thoreau on the Fairways?
So what of golf? Would Thoreau see this as an arena of life where his thoughts on walking find a home? I doubt it.
As a game, golf is the result of human creativity and culture. While it can be a solitary endeavor, the game is in essence a certain type of societal activity. It is the result of a collection of persons connected by something shared in common. The camaraderie and friendship and competition of golf all mark its essence.
It’s no mistake that clubs arise for the game’s play, promotion and preservation. Further, its playing fields are cultivated and shaped by human imagination and labor. The golf course doesn’t safeguard the untouched wildness for which Thoreau is so desirous. So even walking the course seems to fail to meet Thoreau’s ideal.
Thoreau might also take aim at the private club:
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only.
This might be overstating an opposition between Thoreau’s thought and the game of golf, though.
Of all games, golf is the result of discovery. The result of cooperation with the natural world and what it gives. The development of the game on the Scottish dunes is one of accepting the givenness of nature and playing along with it. Surely, it’s the case that a departure has been made from this earlier idyll. Many a course of today is the result of extensive human effort to reshape a landscape, sometimes abusively so.
Nonetheless it remains that unlike the artifice of the baseball or football field, the golfer is found amongst trees and sand and sea. While certainly in the midst of the result of human crafting, the golfer traverses the course facing what the natural world offers.
Golf in a climate-controlled dome would be a travesty. When done well, a golf course and its maintaining can be an example of stewardship and caretaking. See Machrihanish Dunes. (I also think there is a more satisfactory anthropology present in the image of the human person as caretaker—gardener—as part of, but also a cultivator and shaper of nature.)
Further, the golf course is in some ways a liminal place. An in-between. It’s a departure from the workaday world and an entry into a different sort of existence. Walking emphasizes this and allows one to experience this more fully.
While golf is not the wild and untamed of Thoreau, it is an alternative to the demands of commerce and business and necessity. It can help the golfer escape the numbing and dulling noise of the modern world. As a game, it is a free activity that, if done with the proper disposition, can provide a respite and re-creation.
Walking when playing makes for a certain way of being enmeshed in the course rather than romping and rolling over it on four wheels. The walker is also freer. She just saunters past the “Cart Path Only” sign, going wherever she pleases.